Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

This volume received generous financial support from the Committee
on Research and from the Institute of Slavic, East European, and
Eurasian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as
from the Institute for Russian, Soviet and Central and East European
Studies at the University of Nottingham, ...

Note on Transliteration

Within the text we have used the transliteration system of the
Library of Congress, but have altered it slightly to render names
familiar to or at least less unpronounceable for readers unfamiliar with
Russian. In the notes we adhere strictly to the Library of Congress system
when citing Russian sources. ...

Introduction

While supervising an inexperienced pilot on a military training
flight, a taciturn, self-sacrificing hero suddenly loses his eyesight in
E. Pentslin's 1939 film The Destroyers (Istrebiteli). Without indicating
that anything is amiss, he instructs his young charge in the procedures
necessary for a successful landing. ...

Part One: Space and Art

1. Socialist Realism and the Sacralizing of Space

For decades Soviet and Western cultural critics bandied about the
term "socialist realism" as a virtually self-evident category that applied
in all creative fields. Of course some common stipulations for socialist
realism were widely applicable—for example, mandatory optimism,
aesthetic conservatism, moral puritanism, and partiinost, ...

2. The Spatial Poetics of the Personality Cult: Circles around Stalin

A visitor from the Russian provinces to the Soviet Union's Tretiakov
Gallery in Moscow at mid-twentieth century would likely have been
offered a guided tour with a focus on artistic representations of Lenin
and Stalin. The guide might have graduated from a crash course based
on the 1947 essay "Methodical Elaboration of Excursions in the State
Tretiakov Gallery on the Subject: ...

3. Spatial Figures in Soviet Cinema of the 1930s

Patterns of spatial representation are essential for establishing the
styles of different authors or schools, especially in film, where segmentation
of space has been crucial to the development of filmic narration
based on montage. The introduction of the close-up at the
beginning of the twentieth century changed cinema's conception of
spatial representation, ...

4. "Broad Is My Motherland";: The Mother Archetype and Space in the Soviet Mass Song

The famous "Song of the Motherland" from Grigory Aleksandrov's
1936 film Circus (Tsyrk) begins with the following words:
Broad is my motherland,
Many are her forests, fields, and rivers!
I know no other such land,
Where so freely does a man breathe ...

5. The Art of Totality

It perhaps sounds banal to assert that the main function of totalitarian
ideology is a striving for totality. Nevertheless, this claim seems
to be necessary when one hears and reads that the most important goals
of the totalitarianism of the 1930s were the creation of societal homogeneity
and the exclusion of the other. ...

Part Two: Mobilizing the Soviet Subject

6. All This Can Be Yours!: Soviet Commercial Advertising and the Social Construction of Space, 1928-1956

The New Soviet Man and Woman were not only engineers, Stakhanovites,
and kolkhozniki; they were also shoppers, customers, and consumers.
Like people in other industrialized nations, Soviet citizens
struggled to balance their producing and consuming activities. Yet the
shortages of consumer goods endemic to the Soviet economy, ...

7. The Art of Social Navigation: The Cultural Topography of the Stalin Era

The notion of space is among the most stable and basic of human
notions, and therefore it attains its greatest concentration in cultural
products intended for automatic perception. In this chapter I look at
three "topographic spaces" located on the Soviet cultural periphery,
which therefore have gone relatively unnoticed in cultural history: ...

8. "But Eastward, Look, the Land Is Brighter": Toward a Topography of Utopia in the Stalinist Musical

A recent article by Tracy Anderson bore the title, "Why Stalinist
Musicals?"1 The manner in which the question was posed is itself
significant and reflects the distorting lens through which both Western
and "Soviet" scholars have historically viewed Soviet cinema, even
though Anderson's article did much to refocus that lens. ...

Part Three: The Blank Page

9. To Explore or Conquer?: Mobile Perspectives on the Soviet Cultural Revolution

In an unfinished article of the 1940s, Mikhail Bakhtin suggested
that during the 1920s, Vladimir Maiakovsky had sought to reformulate
the Soviet krugozor (horizon), recognizing that "the age and the
masses demand a new range, very distant or very close, just not
medium-range, not domestic."2 ...

10. Tabula Rasa in the North: The Soviet Arctic and Mythic Landscapes in Stalinist Popular Culture

During most of the 1930s, the Soviet Union experienced a fascination
with Arctic exploration that can be described only as a national
craze. Excitement about the Russian North mounted steadily after the
early part of the decade, when the Stalinist regime launched a battery
of polar expeditions that, ...

11. "The Best in the World": The Discourse of the Moscow Metro in the 1930s

In the third volume of his Aesthetics, Hegel wrote of an "independent,
symbolic architecture." At certain times in history, the entire life
of a nation is caught up in the attempt to construct such architectural
works, buildings that give expression to the nation's most cherished
beliefs—for example, its understanding of spiritual concepts such as
God, ...

12. Russo-Soviet Topoi

In attempting to apply the Bakhtinian concept of the chronotope to
Soviet civilization, one discovers a curious pattern: chronos is consistently
displaced and swallowed up by topos. Chronos tends toward
zero, toward the suddenness of miracle, toward the instantaneousness
of revolutionary or eschatological transformation. ...

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